In the immortal paraphrasing of Slack Master Ferris Bueller – leaving our jobs, selling our house, and liquidating most of our possessions to live in our bus may seem a little childish and stupid, but then, so is the rat race…
“You’ll never be able to take a vacation if you live on a farm!” – said my mother’s worried and repeated warnings.
The response is this: What if we built a life we don’t have to constantly plot to escape?
Forget that we haven’t been able to take an actual vacation for several years anyway — It’s the reasoning behind the need for a vacation that is disturbing to us.
Our last (real) vacation was our honeymoon. We rented a hot car, took a couple of changes of clothes (our uniform) and hit the road in the Southwest. We didn’t have a bunch of stuff and we did as we pleased with no alarm clocks and no appointments.
We didn’t buy any souvenirs. We learned that we love to travel on the road together and that there is so much more that the world has to offer us (and that we have to offer the world) than chronic dissatisfaction. We invested in experiences, we had great conversation, we ate like gods, and we had the time of our lives.
So, why can’t life be like that too?
Our life can. The “time of our lives” is going to be …OUR WHOLE LIVES! We are dedicated to focusing on enjoying The Now and not (as James Altucher so perfectly put it in a recent article) “fooling ourselves into thinking that the currency of unhappiness will buy us happiness somewhere down-the-line.”
We still plan for a stable future. We have goals. We continue to work very hard to make our world a better place. We just won’t be volunteering our happiness in exchange anymore. It is unnecessary. Pain is a fact of life, you don’t need to pile it on, it will always be there. Pain means you are alive. Pain does not equal more happiness (unless you’re into that sort of thing).
The cost for us to live our lives this way, is that we must constantly confront our fears and beat them to death. That’s work.
There is no reason for us to work hard to support a lifestyle that doesn’t interest us. There is no room for guilt in happiness. And there will be no reason to pine for a vacation when we already love every day of our lives.
-David & Kristina-
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UPDATE: Now that Mom knows the full extent of our plans and mission, the family is supportive and on-board 100%, well, maybe 95%, ha! — Ma sends us awesome magazines with articles about the best campgrounds in the country AND some cool gear for ALFie to use on the road! Hopefully The Parents will soon join us on some of our adventures! After all, part of the reason we are doing this is for them, even if they don’t quite get that yet. Remember, most of what seems scary in the world is simply unknown — Know it! Own it! Enjoy it! Ask questions! Now is your chance!
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“I always felt, ‘this is how I pay my dues’. But who am I paying dues to? Why must unhappiness be paid out in large quantities in order to eventually acquire happiness? That’s just a myth. The myth of the young caffeinated person working at his or her desk 20 hours a day in order to one day, someday, any day now, please make it all “worth” it. I want the gold watch AND the happiness after all this pain and suffering I paid into the pot.”
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
-Ferris Bueller
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